"How the West Really Lost God"

[kaur]

How the West Really Lost God
By Mary Eberstadt

A new look at secularization.

For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners. Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that “Gott ist tot,” and in sociology as the “secularization thesis,” it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear. As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less needful of its ostensible consolations.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/7827212.html

[Mark O'Neill]

How the West Really Lost God
By Mary Eberstadt

A new look at secularization.



http://www.hoover.org/publications/p...w/7827212.html

Ok, I will go where angels fear to tread - What exactly is your point relating to Small Wars by posting this?

[goesh]

Whoever has God in their corner wins....????

[Mark O'Neill]

Whoever has God in their corner wins....????

Hmmm...... Goesh, I can guess which demographic this one is going to appeal to... there goes all the hope of objectivity and reason...

[goesh]

Allah's Water

Your flowing thoughts are not the attraction
that binds us together on this sacred earth
His oneness is the stillness
but who can bring you to silence
and how do you enter His garden
if you can't hear His thunder of silence?
amidst your constant movement
dedicated to flesh and its support
forever thy focus
and all thy pillars to uphold its transience
when He upholds the very sky without pillars
you flow to neither the beginning nor the end
like drops of rain upon the sand
converging into torrents of motion
that came from His stillness
by attrition will you hear His silence?
what manner of loss can I impose
to hasten thee into the water
and drift back to Him?


(18th century Sufi mystic, attribution unknown)

I see it more as a homily on the dichotomy of polytheism (secularism) and monotheism and not so much a poem, demonstrating the imbalance of life as we know it and suggesting that conflict is from a mystical standpoint a form of celebration and not resolution.

[Mark O'Neill]

I see it more as a homily on the dichotomy of polytheism (secularism) and monotheism and not so much a poem, demonstrating the imbalance of life as we know it and suggesting that conflict is from a mystical standpoint a form of celebration and not resolution.

I would give that sentence a High Distinction for post-modernism 101.

And resubmit any Subaltern or Intern who tried to get a sentence like that past me!
I am having a Forest Gump moment - what does that sentence actually mean in English??? - (I only did a sub-major in English Lit).

[SteveMetz]

OK, I've tried and tried to resist, but you keep posting poetry, so now I feel compelled.....

Baghdad April

Who would have thought even minutes ago
Blackhawk swept from the taupe
Medieval California Kuwait to the quivering sandust of Talil
Sweat, Al-Hilah, Marine bird, older than damp crew, machine
Smell, vibration ammo cammo scraped paint web belts, still
Tighten gray roar and chaos, nose down, brown. Just get us there.

Now green. For ten thousand lives this river ran brown with blood
Helping reeds limber bodies once passed as blind. Just get us there.

Down, then BIAP, destruction for glory
Spurts and unthinking tremors, the shakti of nonduality,
Bills unpaid as crushed planes kneel lame,
Torn tarmac shattered with dust
Fade, then the comic book cantos: a prince of
Babylon, sword of Assyria, builder of Ur, heavens perturbed,
Trauma hung close in crumbled glass, a facade (yet more)
Meaning deep to those who looted that brief cosmic day
Missed by those who watched.

Stories, reprise, thunder run
Endless dust nights of expendable men
blind (they must have been)
To spin a rusty truck against a tank
With only, what? passion? hate?
fear?
Perhaps no thought at all
Except to hope the engine would start (or not)
and no one else would see.
No matter. They are now mist, counters in a game.

We hurry, are watched, relief, no love and
Bomblets are toys, slipping through dry canals with a last black smoke
to please a small hand as
Green towers turn red, mating in the night.
Somehow we must have known (even a
first summer wind will dry the eye). Yet
Rank on file is an army of shrouds, mist,
And hot days turn gray, crafting wry smiles.
Then fade. Finally,

to destroy and build, Shiva in web gear
While somewhere a bridge is lost. But what?
Who is destroyer, who a builder? We know
Often great power is only owning the detritus.
Still there is BIAP, flight out, home, strong shoulders and
Hiphop, path to insanity and relief.
And then, a tiny point of blood receding on the glass.

[Mark O'Neill]

OK, I've tried and tried to resist, but you keep posting poetry, so now I feel compelled.....

Baghdad April

Who would have thought even minutes ago
Blackhawk swept from the taupe
Medieval California Kuwait to the quivering sandust of Talil
Sweat, Al-Hilah, Marine bird, older than damp crew, machine
Smell, vibration ammo cammo scraped paint web belts, still
Tighten gray roar and chaos, nose down, brown. Just get us there.

Now green. For ten thousand lives this river ran brown with blood
Helping reeds limber bodies once passed as blind. Just get us there.

Down, then BIAP, destruction for glory
Spurts and unthinking tremors, the shakti of nonduality,
Bills unpaid as crushed planes kneel lame,
Torn tarmac shattered with dust
Fade, then the comic book cantos: a prince of
Babylon, sword of Assyria, builder of Ur, heavens perturbed,
Trauma hung close in crumbled glass, a facade (yet more)
Meaning deep to those who looted that brief cosmic day
Missed by those who watched.

Stories, reprise, thunder run
Endless dust nights of expendable men
blind (they must have been)
To spin a rusty truck against a tank
With only, what? passion? hate?
fear?
Perhaps no thought at all
Except to hope the engine would start (or not)
and no one else would see.
No matter. They are now mist, counters in a game.

We hurry, are watched, relief, no love and
Bomblets are toys, slipping through dry canals with a last black smoke
to please a small hand as
Green towers turn red, mating in the night.
Somehow we must have known (even a
first summer wind will dry the eye). Yet
Rank on file is an army of shrouds, mist,
And hot days turn gray, crafting wry smiles.
Then fade. Finally,

to destroy and build, Shiva in web gear
While somewhere a bridge is lost. But what?
Who is destroyer, who a builder? We know
Often great power is only owning the detritus.
Still there is BIAP, flight out, home, strong shoulders and
Hiphop, path to insanity and relief.
And then, a tiny point of blood receding on the glass.

Steve,

Brave stuff,

I would offer a review except that it is 2230 on a Friday night here and my brain is fried after wrestling with a piece of my monograph that is not appearing on the page as my brain wants it too. Alas, I am always a far better writer in my head when I am thinking my thoughts rather than trying to write them down

I wonder if the world is ready for poetry rather than prose in my COIN strategy monograph? I suspect not .. especially since my creative poetry ability is more like some of those USMC limericks recently posted on another forum..

[goesh]

"Shiva in webgear" - what a metaphor! This smacks of Allan Ginsberg and "Howl". You can make a few bucks off that line I think but neither of us better give up our day jobs to become poets.

[SteveMetz]

Steve,

Brave stuff,

I would offer a review except that it is 2230 on a Friday night here and my brain is fried after wrestling with a piece of my monograph that is not appearing on the page as my brain wants it too. Alas, I am always a far better writer in my head when I am thinking my thoughts rather than trying to write them down

I wonder if the world is ready for poetry rather than prose in my COIN strategy monograph? I suspect not .. especially since my creative poetry ability is more like some of those USMC limericks recently posted on another forum..

My life's objective is to distill ideas to the most perfect and sparse, zen-like prose possible. I've told my boss that one of these days I'm going to publish the first haiku Strategic Studies Institute monograph.

[SteveMetz]

"Shiva in webgear" - what a metaphor! This smacks of Allan Ginsberg and "Howl". You can make a few bucks off that line I think but neither of us better give up our day jobs to become poets.

For what it's worth, the thing is copyrighted. I'm sitting here in my doublewide on cinderblocks, with three major appliances on the porch and a half a pack of Camels, waiting for the royalty checks to come rolling in so my wife can afford that big hair she's always wanted.

[goesh]

Grunt

There was a Marine from Nantucket
who told the Old Man to piss in a bucket
the Old man raised his boot, ya' know where he stuck it
at his Court Martial the Marine said f*** it
when he got to the brig the lifers said suck it
swung a lead pipe and the Marine couldn't duck it
thus ends the saga of the Marine from Nantucket

[VinceC]

I am reminded for the memorable line from John Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down" -- which fictionalized the German occupation of Norway; the invading army takes over a coastal town after a brief, decisive battle, then settles in to administer it and try to make peace with the locals. Instead, the invaders who are portrayed with a fair amount of understanding if not sympathy, find themselves slowly losing their grip as townspeople launch increasingly sophisticated insurgency attacks. Toward the end, one of the invading officers says a line which becomes a theme of the novel: "The flies have conquered the flypaper."

[Mark O'Neill]

My life's objective is to distill ideas to the most perfect and sparse, zen-like prose possible. I've told my boss that one of these days I'm going to publish the first haiku Strategic Studies Institute monograph.

I can see Doug buying that......

Good luck with finding peer reveiwers for that effort

[Mark O'Neill]

For what it's worth, the thing is copyrighted. I'm sitting here in my doublewide on cinderblocks, with three major appliances on the porch and a half a pack of Camels, waiting for the royalty checks to come rolling in so my wife can afford that big hair she's always wanted.

Guess that someone in the family should have some hair.....

[goesh]

- speaking of occupations, I recall from a tv special on post-war Germany that displaced people caused all kinds of problems after the war. They were roaming around the countryside by the thousands - looting, stealing, bushwhacking people, etc. Eisenhower established a 38,000 man task force to deal with these folks. That's roughly 1/4th of our force deployment in Iraq today but I believe this force of 38K was responsible for other areas besides Germany.

[VinceC]

Most concentration camps were turned into Displaced Persons camps after the war. A lot of stateless people continued to live in them for years. If I recall correctly, former Joint Chiefs chairman General John Shalikashvilli spent time as a young man or boy in a DP camp in Germany run by the American Constabulary before his family immigrated to the U.S.

[kaur]

Mark O'Neill asked:

What exactly is your point relating to Small Wars by posting this?

My point is that there has been a lot of talk about motivation and narratives. Partly this is related with religion, about concept that some people are beliving in. My link explains how faith evolves and there are variables that are influencing this.

[marct]

Hi Folks,

I see it more as a homily on the dichotomy of polytheism (secularism) and monotheism and not so much a poem, demonstrating the imbalance of life as we know it and suggesting that conflict is from a mystical standpoint a form of celebration and not resolution.

I would give that sentence a High Distinction for post-modernism 101.

LOLOL. Goesh, the only problem with your homily, outside of it definitely being PM , is that secularism is polytheism - it's exactly what the Gnostics and Cathars accused the orthodox churches of doing; worshiping the "Lord of this world". O course, the characterization of bin Ladin as Azrael and Nancy Pelosi as Madame Pedacoque do have a certain charm...

My life's objective is to distill ideas to the most perfect and sparse, zen-like prose possible. I've told my boss that one of these days I'm going to publish the first haiku Strategic Studies Institute monograph.

Strangely enough, that may be one of the best ways to present it. Hmmm, "29 Haikus and Koans for the COIN Warrior"??

Marc

[marct]

My point is that there has been a lot of talk about motivation and narratives. Partly this is related with religion, about concept that some people are beliving in. My link explains how faith evolves and there are variables that are influencing this.

Agreed, "religion", loosely construed, does have a lot to do with it, especially in the area of narratives. After all, what is "democracy" except a non-theistic religious narrative?

Marc